("The nation should understand that it cannot fully appreciate the premeditated academic corruption of TAKS that will unfold without first understanding the retroactive corruption of TAAS. How did Texas pull off the miracle? And, is this where the nation really wants to go?" EdNews.org: "Texas Equity & Other Pleasant Fairy Tales"/March 7, 2003)

"Wrapping Up TAAS: Part 2" 
By GEORGE SCOTT
Senior Editorial Writer EdNews.org

Is it fair to use The College Board's Advanced Placement testing program to evaluate the claims by the Texas Education Agency that its Texas Educational Miracle has produced high levels of academic excellence in reading, math, and science over the past decade?

Yes. In fact, it is crucial that any and all independent academic measures be used in this context. The State of Texas has made bold claims about its success. It asserts both dramatic progress and criterion-defined excellence by its students from elementary school to high school algebra, biology and English.

As noted previously, the Rand Corporation could not validate these Texas claims in its study using the national NAEP testing program. Correlation studies of student academic performance on TAAS and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test in the Dallas and Houston Independent School Districts destroyed the credibility of the State's well-documented assertions.

Dramatic progress and the asserted criterion excellence have not been matched in Texas by college entrance tests such as SAT or ACT. In fact, there's not one independent, national and credible measure of academic performance of Texas students that has been able to validate or replicate Texas' claims asserted under the State's accountability system.

In this context of many, The College Board testing program provides another opportunity to evaluate Texas claims. It is a piece of the puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle.

Since this is my final column in which I will deal exclusively with the history of the TAAS testing program (I will still reference it often), I am going to take some extra words to put the AP testing program in context.

Here's what I don't believe:

  • I don't believe that everybody who passes biology in high school is interested in science and will pursue upper level science instruction. Thus, I don't believe that all who pass an EOC Biology test should be expected to even take or pass an AP Biology test.
  • Ditto for algebra as it relates to upper level math instruction and AP testing such as for AP Calculus.

Here's what I do believe:

  • I believe a student is not going to get to AP Biology or AP Calculus or the other math, science or math-based science AP tests without first going through algebra and biology at the level Texas tests in its end-of-course testing program.
  • I believe high levels of criterion mastery on Algebra I and Biology I noted on state-controlled assessment instruments in Texas should self-evidently manifest itself in ANY upper level math and science-testing program on a national standard.
  • I believe that a district's or state's success in the AP testing program (although intended to provide college credit to students) is a perfectly acceptable way to evaluate, in part, the strategic success of high school curriculum and academic goal-setting. The vast majority of students who take any AP tests are juniors and seniors in high school.
  • While the "ego" of participation in advanced programs is a sufficient measure to some, I evaluate the results. I have monitored public schools for too long to fall victim again to public relations schemes that push totally unprepared children into programs for which they do not have the requisite academic skills to succeed. Such efforts as "requiring" all junior high students to take algebra produce great press releases about higher standards and little else.

The State of Texas has a "pool" of up to almost 300,000 students who have passed EOC Biology in any given junior and senior classes. There's a pool of up to 400,000 or more of these juniors and seniors who have passed their 10 th grade exit math test and perhaps up to 200,000 to 250,000 who have scored a the higher range of the TAAS math test.

A Texas junior and senior class in 2001-2002 could have a pool of between 200,000 and 300,000 who passed EOC Algebra. As it relates to EOC Biology and EOC Algebra, there were significant percentages who "mastered" the tests.

Yet from this pool of hundred thousands of students described as achieving criterion excellence in math and/or science, Texas produced the following numbers of passing scores on the following AP tests in 2001-02:

Biology: 2,274
Chemistry: 1,470
Calculus AB 5,341
Calculus BC 2,034
Physics B 846
Physics (M) 773
Physics (E&M) 395

This means that after a decade of the Texas Educational Miracle 'defining' both extraordinary growth and raw performance in math and science skills, Texas could only produce a consistent range of 8/100 of one percent to 1% of its junior and senior enrollment passing AP math or science tests.

To be sure, there has been "progress" in Texas as measured against AP performance since 1993-94. This progress has begun to slow as the predictable initial "surge" of progress has stabilized. What an oxymoron! Texas has "surged" to having 47/100 of one percent of its 11 th and 12 grade class score 3, 4 or 5 on an AP Biology test in 2002 when it has a pool of up to some 300,000 students who have passed its state-controlled EOC Biology test.

There's another very valid reason for the using the AP testing program to "test" the credibility of Texas' academic claims. I'll use the school district in Texas that all my children have or do attend as an example.

I am not going to use this column to expound in detail upon the academic accomplishments of my children in upper level math and science and the impact their skills have had and will have on their college careers.

I will reference my children to communicate some basis for attesting to the fact that the upper level math and science teachers in the Katy Independent School District in Texas are excellent. My children's elementary and junior high teachers have been valuable partners. Therefore, this column should not be perceived as an attack on the quality of the teachers in a district that is recognized as one of the very best in the State of Texas. Teachers are also victims in the corruption that high-stakes testing imposes on the classroom in so many ways.

Katy I.S.D. is typical American suburbia. It is essentially White and affluent. The "raw product" (children) that enters the Katy I.S.D. absent the traditional barriers to learning ranks the district's demographic profile as one of the more upper-scale in Texas if not the United States.

The "worst" of its four high schools is better than the majority of high schools in the State. It has some of the highest performing junior high schools in Texas. The "best" of its high schools are the proverbial cream of the crop.

This is a school district that found over 66% of its combined freshman class (recent) performing at the 70 th percentile or better on the Stanford Achievement Test in math and 59% and 53% respectively of its students performing at that level or better on the SAT9 science and reading tests.

Some 36% of the students performed above the 90 th percentile in math and some 25% of the 9 th grade students scored at that level or better in science and reading

This is a school district whose students perform at the upper levels of every test the State of Texas has administered as a part of its accountability program including TAAS and EOC Algebra, EOC Biology and EOC English.

It is a district that graduates some of the most brilliant students in the United States. Yet, like America, a better understanding of reality will demonstrate that it is also a district where the gap between the brilliant and the under-achieving and under-educated is growing wider.

Because Katy I.S.D. has been able to literally coast on the affluence of its patrons per the State's academically corrupt accountability system, it is also a district that has compromised its academic goals for its students.

Eight years or so ago, Katy I.S.D. says it began emphasizing its College Board Advanced Placement testing program. Like many programs that shift into a higher gear, improvement of some degree was inevitable.

This is similar in principle to what happens when a community first enacts a crime prevention program. The "reported" crime rate goes up and then it stabilizes.

Katy I.S.D. has shown improvement since 1993-94, but that progress has now stabilized at three of the four high schools. The brand new high school that is now in its third year of AP testing is still showing progress. It is pacing the majority of the district's overall growth in the math and science AP tests.

Katy I.S.D. is a district that had some 4,786 juniors and seniors in 2001-02 comprised of students who have earned the District's schools more exemplary ribbons on the State's accountability system than the vast majority of all districts in Texas.

Yet, only 69 students scored 3, 4 or 5 on the AP Biology test in 2002. Only 37 students performed at that level in AP Chemistry while 28 performed at that level in Physics B; 7 in Physics Mechanical; and 1 in Physics E&M.

Out of this extraordinary raw talent as measured by independent standards, one of the premiere school districts in Texas, the State extrapolated between 2/100 of one percent in AP Physics E&M to 1.4% in AP Biology after a decade of TAAS miracles and acclamation.

The "best" measure in math and science in this exemplary district was the fact that 238 students or 4.3% of its junior and senior enrollment scored a passing standard on AB Calculus.

Katy I.S.D. is the school district that previously tried to force junior high students to take algebra. What it discovered was that most children had reached junior high generally lacking the requisite skills to succeed in real algebra. It abandoned this effort but never retracted the press releases that accompanied this noble initiative.

Within the story of Katy I.S.D. is one of the more disgusting and dishonorable components of the TEA's fraudulent accountability system it has imposed on Texas and is trying to sell as a "Miracle" to the nation.

The story of Katy I.S.D. and all of its glory is the story of what happens when a State imposes an accountability system based upon mediocrity and academic fraud as represented by its testing program.

It is a story of an accountability system that tests students on a fraudulent academic standard as documented by this series of columns and rewards schools, districts and administrators for the corrupt "accomplishments."

It is not about teachers. It is about a system that rewards mediocrity until it is too late for all but the very best of students. It is about a system that moves students to the brink of high school with presumed academic skills as measured by a state-controlled testing program.

It's about the lies that Texas has told parents about the academic skills of their children.

Because of our knowledge, my wife and I decided that we could not trust one of the finest school districts in Texas to teach our children the 'gateway' math course of algebra based upon its demonstrable failure to maximize the inherent talents of the majority of its students.

Our son and daughter took Algebra I in the summer after their seventh grades in the Duke University TIP program. Both started the 9 th grade with Algebra 1 and geometry completed and one started with Algebra II in the books also. We owed it to our children to get them past the roadblock that Katy I.S.D. has erected for the vast majority of its students.

Consider that if there is a demonstrable roadblock in Katy I.S.D., there's a virtual Grand Canyon in most of Texas.

As I close the focus upon the TAAS-based accountability system and prepare to move to TAKS and more, consider this fact.

Armed with some of the most school-ready-raw-product students of any public school district in the United States of America, the intellectually gutless Katy I.S.D. School Board did not, does not and has not required one single high school in the district to include one single objective standard of how many students it expects to pass one single AP test.

For the past decade, the Katy I.S.D. School Board has allowed board-approved campus action plans containing the academic goals of its high schools to focus on TAAS and EOC and the associated mediocrity of those standards. In the process, it has rewarded administrators. It has failed to make the types of management decisions that would permit many outstanding teachers do so much more for so many more students. In the Board's salute to mediocrity and acquiescence to ego, it came to represent so much of what is wrong with high-stakes testing even in the "best" districts.

In this failure of intellectual leadership and courage, the Board has been "enabled" and rewarded by a State that needed and profited from having such exemplary schools as Katy I.S.D. in its showcase. 

I began this series of columns last March this way:

The cynic's contention validated by centuries of experience is that government lies as necessary to reward and protect the interests of its politicians and financially vested sycophants who prosper in the public trough.

Lies, of course, must serve noble causes.

What purpose is nobler than communicating the successful and effective public education of our youth? What is nobler than effectively erasing the vestiges of inhuman racial discrimination that have ravaged academic and economic futures of generations of minority youth?

Conversely, for what purpose is the truth more crucial and misrepresentation more despicable? At what point in our nation's history has the discernment between the two been more important to society's future?

The State has lied to state and federal courts about the academic credibility of claims it has closed the equity gap between White and at-risk minority students. Because it has lied to the courts, it has lied to parents of at-risk minority students. Now that the initial TAKS results are documenting the deception and lies, groups representing these minority students should go back to the courthouse and seek damages, perhaps sanctions.

The State has lied to the broad range of parents about the true nature of the grade-level and beyond academic skills of significant percentages of its students.

The deception of the Texas Educational Miracle and its TAAS-based accountability system has been nothing less than a thousands points of lies.

My wife and I are parents who refused to believe the lies.

Now, I'll move on to TAKS and more.

Request FOUR PDF TABLES HERE

Statewide All Students
Statewide African-American Students
Statewide Hispanic Students
Statewide White Students